Penny Arcade’s “On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4” concludes the saga of Tycho Brahe, Scion of The Long Project, and his almost certainly human partner Jonathan Gabriel. The world has been destroyed, but existence extends beyond this mortal plane in the gruesome Underhell!

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Penny Arcade’s “On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness 4” concludes the saga of Tycho Brahe, Scion of The Long Project, and his almost certainly human partner Jonathan Gabriel. The world has been destroyed, but existence extends beyond this mortal plane in the gruesome Underhell! The new game expands considerably on its predecessor in size, scope and gameplay. Create the ultimate fighting force by recruiting bizarre, occasionally disgusting monsters and teaming them up with the best trainer for the job!

Key Features

Old-School RPG style mixed with modern design sensibilities!

Bizarre and humorous story written by Penny Arcade & Zeboyd Games!

Over twice as many area maps as the previous game!

Explore the Underhell world (in all its traditional RPG glory) and discover its many secrets.

No random battles!

Music created by Hyperduck Soundworks (Dust: An Elysian Tail, Mojang's Scrolls)!

With some nice Snes-like graphics and interesting mechanics, this is a game I can recommend, although it's not without flaws and aspects that simply didn't click with me.

Long version:

Graphically, I would say it is at an "advanced Snes" level of quality. The maps of the game vary in quality and inspiration, with some being very nice, like the jungle. The portraits of NPCs were not that great, but the sprites in combat looked pretty good, and all were properly animated.

The music is great, and was made by Hyperduck, known for their work in some indie titles (they did the soundtrack for Dust: An Elysean Tail for example), but I felt there were a few situations where the music did not match the environment, as was the case with the desert. But that does not change the fact that it is great to have music of such quality after the horrendous soundtrack of PA: RSPD 3.

One thing I like about Zeboyd games is how they pick some classic JRPG systems and enhance some features, leaving the boring bits... a lot less boring.

As for the combat system, it's a mix of Grandia and Pokemon:

The protagonists do not fight directly, but acquire a team of creatures throughout the game for use in combat and act as their trainers. Each creature has its own skills, expertise and equipment types it can use, and in addition each can "equip" a trainer, which determines the progression of status when leveling up and also gives access to skills from that trainer.

The Grandia part is how the the action order works, which, by the way, was also used in the recent Child of Light: There is a time bar and the icons of all those involved in combating above it. When an icon reaches a certain point of the bar, the character decides on a command. Then the "casting time" of the command begins while the icon travels the rest of the bar, and when it reaches the end the action is taken and the icon goes back to the beginning of the bar. The catch is that there are attacks and skills that cause interruptions, making a character go back on the bar, and if it happens between the command and execution the character is thrown far behind. This ends up having a strategic use in the tougher battles.

The "zeboyd" part of the system is, among other things, the fact that everything (including items) recovers at the end of a battle, making each combat the focus of the challenge, instead of resource management during exploration. Moreover all the monsters are visible on the map and do not respawn, making every fight somewhat unique. Thus, even battles with normal enemies are planned so you have to pay attention because your characters may die if they fight relying just on normal attacks. The downside is that it makes battles time-consuming and also takes away some of the impact from bosses, since they are not much harder than a fight against five strong enemies in the same dungeon, for example.

Because of the way the progression and narrative were structured, around halfway through the game I was finding it all a tad monotonous as it was following a very poorly disguised "go through that dungeon, upgrade your equipment in that city, rinse and repeat" mechanic. Alas, the towns had hardly anything interesting, all of which contained only NPCs giving "funny" remarks or some semi-relevant information (through funny remarks) on the current region. Eventually very short dialogues between characters would occur at the entrances and exits of dungeons, but nothing that could get me invested. By the time I got to late game things got better, mainly because of the battles becoming more interesting with the best skills of my monsters.

About the plot, written by Penny Arcade... It's a story that tries to have epic proportions while using a humor deeply rooted in sarcasm all the time. It's bizarre to see the characters of the strips (and others created for the game) alternating between making sarcastic jokes and taking things uncomfortably seriously in a plot that never suspends any disbelief. It felt extremely pretentious, and almost every character (except for Gabe) is extremely obnoxious and arrogant. Another problem is that narratives and descriptions were writen full of flowery and pretentious rubbish, which ends up killing the fun of the jokes it tries to tell, with just a few instances hitting home. I prefer the kind of humor written by Zeboyd themselves, such as what can be seen in Cthulhu Saves the World.

This is a great classic-style RPG. Even if you don't read the series, I'm sure you can appreciate it if you're looking for this type of game.

One thing that really stood out, though, was the soundtrack. It was AMAZING. I'm willing to put it up there with the greats like Megaman 2 and even with the Lunar series. Just a straight up great soundtrack. Hot damn.

Glad it was short, though. I was getting "battle fatigue." Nearly every chest is guarded by an enemy and every path has a bunch. I had a few moments where I was just like, "JESUS, LET ME THROUGH UNHINDERED!" But nah. They don't do that. So, really, of the 12.9 hours it took me (all I was missing was getting Dr. MissingNo), I'd say that about 9 hours of that was in battles.

Overall, great game. Especially for the price. And a must have for PA fans.

the combat becomes unbearably repetitive mostly because one is so keen to rather keep experiencing the funny dialogue, and humorous but also dramatic story, so you end up steaming along trying to get it all done in one go, but every path is blocked by constant fights.

fortunately you can speed thru the fights by decreasing the game difficulty to "easy" (at any time) and holding down a certain key (i forget which) to accelerate the animations. I do recommend this game, but play it on easy. Combat mechanic is just too meh to bother with.

thats not to say that the combat is awful, its just that there is about 15+ hours worth of combat and thats way too much for what ends up being recylcing the same abilities in the same order again, and again....and again.....and again.